The “small scale” part of my comment is a bit of an overstatement. Perhaps I should have said “smallest practical scale”.
I believe mostly in letting people make choices for themselves, which I think is best served by having organisations at a size where an individual voice has the opportunity to make a difference.
This can be achieved in many different ways, including having partially independent subdivisions within large scale organizations.
One of the (many) failings of the USSR was, at least for a long time at the start, insufficient flexibility and reactivity to local issues. But thinking about it, maybe this isn’t a good reason to think ill of centralized planning. The USSR had incompetent centralized planning (especially in the agricultural sector in the earlier days), the failures and famines could be argued to me more due to the incompetence than to core attributes of centralized planning.
In that case, I don’t really think we disagree. Many Socialist states have smaller cells for decision-making that doesn’t necessarily benefit from having more information or cooperation between cells. The Soviet model functioned much in the same way, though it had its own share of issues such as planning by hand, rather than computer, and trying to abolish market forces before they outlived their usefulness.
China presently does a good job juggling all of these complicated nuances, and their party structure plays a large part in that. Central planning works best in highly developed firms, and markets do a good job of reaching those levels of development.
The “small scale” part of my comment is a bit of an overstatement. Perhaps I should have said “smallest practical scale”.
I believe mostly in letting people make choices for themselves, which I think is best served by having organisations at a size where an individual voice has the opportunity to make a difference.
This can be achieved in many different ways, including having partially independent subdivisions within large scale organizations.
One of the (many) failings of the USSR was, at least for a long time at the start, insufficient flexibility and reactivity to local issues. But thinking about it, maybe this isn’t a good reason to think ill of centralized planning. The USSR had incompetent centralized planning (especially in the agricultural sector in the earlier days), the failures and famines could be argued to me more due to the incompetence than to core attributes of centralized planning.
In that case, I don’t really think we disagree. Many Socialist states have smaller cells for decision-making that doesn’t necessarily benefit from having more information or cooperation between cells. The Soviet model functioned much in the same way, though it had its own share of issues such as planning by hand, rather than computer, and trying to abolish market forces before they outlived their usefulness.
China presently does a good job juggling all of these complicated nuances, and their party structure plays a large part in that. Central planning works best in highly developed firms, and markets do a good job of reaching those levels of development.